Are we truly free to do what’s right in America?

Look at American culture. Something basic is missing. Americans know it. Nothing much works as it should. Simple daily choices seem fraught with peril. In the workplace, we walk on eggshells. Big projects — say, modernizing infrastructure — get stalled in years of review. Endemic social problems such as homelessness become, well, more endemic. Oh, there goes San Francisco. Doing what’s right is not on the table. Who’s to say what’s right? Extremism grows.

Powerlessness has become a defining feature of modern society. Americans at all levels of responsibility feel powerless to do what they think is needed. The culture wars, sociologist James Davison Hunter explains, stem from institutional impotence: A “growing majority of Americans believe that their government cannot be trusted, that its leaders ... are incompetent and self-interested, and that as citizens, they personally have little power to influence the ... institutions or circumstances that shape their lives.” Feeling fragile, and buffeted by forces beyond our control, many Americans retreat to online groups defined by identity and by distrust of the other side as “a threat to [our] existence.”

It’s hard to identify what’s wrong amid the clamor and conflict in modern society. But a clue can be found in remembering what makes us proud. America is where people roll up our sleeves and get it done. The ability to do things in our own ways activates the values for which America is well-known: self-reliance, pragmatism and loyalty to the greater good — what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood.” For most of American history, the power and imperative to own your actions and solutions—the concept of individual responsibility — was implicit in the idea of freedom.

Americans didn’t abandon our belief in individual responsibility. It was taken away from us by a post- 1960s legal framework that, with the best of intentions, made people squirm through the eye of a legal needle before taking responsibility. Individual responsibility to a broader group, for example, was dislodged by a new concept of individual rights focused on what’s best for one person or constituency. The can-do culture became the can’t-do culture. At every level of responsibility, Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible. The teacher in the classroom, the principal in a school, the nurse in the hospital, the official in Washington, the parent on the field trip,